Almost three years ago, the Rev. Tish Harrison Warren walked away from the biggest platform a theological writer could have and left her role as an opinion columnist at The New York Times. Her advice to young Christian writers today is this: Focus less on building a platform and more on honing your craft, finding your voice, and understanding your beliefs.
Warren joined the Baylor community in January 2026 as the inaugural C.S. Lewis Theological Writer-in-Residence at Truett Theological Seminary in the newly established Anglican Episcopal House.
Her journey here has been anything but linear. Warren simply never thought she would be a writer — and certainly never thought she would build a life off of her love for words.
“I grew up in a very pragmatic Texas home,” she explained. “So saying you wanted to be a writer would be like a little boy saying he wants to be a professional baseball player. Like, ‘good luck with that,’ you know?”
Despite that, Warren has memories of writing from a young age. She can recall sending her older sister off to college at Baylor with a framed poem that Warren herself had written to hang in her dorm room.
But still, a career as a writer was not in the plan.
Instead, Warren was preparing for full-time vocational ministry. Although Warren is now Anglican and ordained in the Anglican church, she grew up in a Southern Baptist church — a denomination that continues to enforce that the office of pastor should be strictly limited to men. Growing up in that context, she was unsure what a career in ministry would look like for her.
But she followed the path, putting one foot in front of the other, eventually leading her to Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. It was while she was in seminary that her love for writing resurfaced.
“I had several … professors who said, ‘You know, you have a gift in writing. You are particularly gifted at writing theological essays,’” Warren reflected.
But Warren struggled to imagine building a career out of her passion. After all, it is difficult to type “poetic essayist” into a LinkedIn or Indeed job search and expect anything to come up.
“The things that I loved were poetry, essays, and theological writing,” Warren said. “If being a writer at all felt out of reach, certainly being a poetic essayist was just beyond what I could imagine someone doing for a living.”
But despite her inability to picture it, Warren couldn’t deny that writing was something she felt she was supposed to do — something God was calling her to.
“In a way that is hard for me to explain, I just felt profoundly, profoundly called,” Warren said. “I didn’t know what to do with that because a lot of people feel that way.”
She described it as an overwhelming and suffocating need to write.
Like any artist, it is easy to push your craft to the back of your to-do list. For Warren, life was busy with children, work, and daily responsibilities. She had little time to develop and hone her craft. But people continued to champion her and ask to read more of what she had to say.
“My friend, Marcia Bosscher … was editing a blog for InterVarsity’s Women in the Academy and Professions called The Well. She asked me to write something for them … I had a newborn baby and was very busy, but she kept bugging me about it,” said Warren with laughter. “So I wrote it for her for no money. Then she just called me back the day I turned it in, and she was like, ‘You have a voice. You’re a writer.’”
Eventually, a piece she wrote for The Well in 2013 went viral. The article was seen by Andy Crouch, former editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, who later shared it on his own platforms.
Warren reached out to Crouch to thank him for his support, and he responded by inviting her to pitch an article to Christianity Today.
“I just started developing a little bit of an audience. People just found [my writing], and then other people asked me to write. It just kept going,” Warren said.
Eventually, she received a call from InterVarsity Press inviting her to submit a book proposal. In 2016 Warren published her first book, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life, which went on to win Christianity Today’s 2018 Book of the Year award.
In August 2021, Warren joined the opinion team at The New York Times as a columnist, an opportunity she never could have imagined for herself. In fact, she didn’t even chase the job — The New York Times called her.
Shortly after joining the staff at The Times, Warren released her second book, Prayer in the Night, which won Christianity Today’s 2022 Book of the Year, as well as ECPA’s 2022 Christian Book of the Year.
Looking from the outside in, Warren had reached the height of her career. With two bestselling books under her belt and a weekly newsletter running on one of the biggest platforms in America, it came as a shock to her many followers when she left her position at The Times in 2023.
“I will miss getting to write in the pages of The Times each week,” Warren wrote in her final newsletter. “There is a stereotype among some conservative religious people that in media or other public-facing institutions, voices of people of faith, especially the more traditional sorts of faith, are marginalized and unwelcome. I think that this has some truth to it and have even experienced that in certain settings over the years. I have not, however, experienced this at The Times.”
Warren’s decision to leave had little to do with the role itself.
“On one level, what I did was completely insane. I did have the greatest platform and a great job. I … am extremely grateful for my time there,” Warren said.
While she does admit that writing about God for the general public each week can be difficult for the soul, her decision to leave had more to do with the need to give more attention to other areas of her life than her full-time job allowed. She also desired to become more like the person she was encouraging others to be in her writing.
“If my motivation was career, it was not the best career move. But I wanted to be a person who really believed and really lived the things that I wrote about,” Warren said.
Part of living out what she wrote required Warren to slow down and invest more time in the people she cared most about.
“It was an emotionally big job, and when I wasn’t doing the work, it was still occupying my mind, and I still had to be always on call in some sense …” said Warren. “I [wanted] to choose my kids there. Not just my kids, but my neighbors, people in my embodied world.”
But leaving her role at The Times by no means meant abandoning her identity as a writer — in fact, one of the reasons that factored into her decision to leave was how much she missed long-form writing.
Shortly after her departure, Warren got to work on her next book, What Grows in Weary Lands: On Christian Resilience. Her book was released in May 2026, just 4 months after she accepted her new part-time position at Baylor.
In Warren’s new role as a writer-in-residence at Truett, she gets to focus on the kind of writing, community, and spiritual formation she loves most.
“I feel like they basically invited me to come be Tish at Baylor,” Warren said.
Additionally, as part of her new role, she is investing in people in her “embodied world” both through relationships with fellow Baylor faculty members and in mentoring students.
“Part of the reason I came to Baylor is because of the community. I have friends there that I really respect …” Warren said. “The kind of intellectual community that it’s fostering is really just super unique … It’s a place I can sit and talk theology over a beer or a cup of coffee with people, but also talk about how my kids are doing. It’s just very human in a way that I was really drawn to.”
Warren has the specific role of teaching and mentoring Anglican and Episcopal students enrolled at Truett — one that feels completely natural to her, having spent so many years in campus ministry.
“In terms of younger students now, I think the things that I often want to tell them are to focus on knowing what they believe and the work of communicating what they believe in the best possible way, as opposed to platform,” said Warren.
Warren said there are a lot of voices out there, and more people are trying to build a career off writing than ever before. But she encourages young Christians not to fall into the overwhelming pit of building a following and instead redirects their attention.
“I think there are too many people trying to be writers now, which is a little bit hypocritical for me to say because I’m still writing,” Warren explained. “But it’s very easy to … put your words in the public right now … because you can post immediately. It’s much harder to craft something that is deep, and that is beautiful.”
And if there is one thing that has remained consistent on Warren’s winding journey of unexpected opportunities, it is a commitment to writing that is deep and writing that is beautiful.
